TINA prompts you to perform the following management actions in the following order, repeatedly: Thinking, Implementing, Numbering and Analysing. As the management steering wheel turns, each of these activities rises to the top of the wheel and demands your attention. What actions does that demand on your attention provoke?
Think about what you what to do and produce a plan of what needs to happen and when. Then implement that plan so that you achieve what is required to carry your business forward. Ensure that you assign numbers to your achievements, so that your progress through survival to success can be tracked in a way that can be agreed upon by your entire team. Finally, analyse your business data to check that you are doing what you think that you are doing and that your business is where it needs to be. Then keep doing it.
You will have noticed that we’ve covered TINA’s sectors by moving around the management steering wheel in a clockwise manner, but, in the real world, to do so the wheel would have to be moving in an anti—clockwise direction. If you interpret ‘moving forward’ as travelling from left to right, then the wheel is travelling backwards. Don’t worry, this is not a problem if we simply change our perspective and describe what TINA is helping you to accomplish is a slightly different way.
Making informed decisions is the most important function of a manager, especially if that manager is the owner of a start—up business. One of the prerequisites to an informed decision is information, which you must acquire from both inside and outside of your organisation. The information from inside tells you how your business is running, whilst the information from outside tells you where you are on your journey relative to the rest of the world.
To taste success you first have to survive the journey to the table!
Information comes from putting your data into context, by applying other information, other data, and performing some analysis, statistical or otherwise. The data comes from your monitoring and measuring activities, where you assign numbers to specific parameters within your business, and in some cases to parameters from the economic environment in which you operate. If you are to move your business forward, then these parameters must involve continuing achievement because, if you aren’t achieving anything, then at best you’ll stand still and at worse you’ll roll backwards and fail.
Your achievements are what happens when you implement your plans, the result of you and your team actually doing what you’ve planned to do. Don’t get stuck on the opposite side of the management steering wheel with analysis paralysis; get stuff done and you should move forward. Your plans are the result of you thinking about what you want to do and making informed decisions based on the information that you have acquired from both inside and outside of your business. And thus the management steering wheel turns.
At the very beginning of this course, we saw that, depending on which set of figures you review, somewhere in the region of 25% to 35% of new start—up businesses fail within in their first two years. Worse, over half of them fail to make it beyond Year 5! That is information that should shock any business owner, or potential business owner, and it is the reason that this course was written. My hope is that by using TINA to help manage your business, you will be one of those who avoids the failure abyss and goes on to business success.
If you have found any of the suggestions within this course helpful and want additional guidance, hints and tips, then there are other resources available in the Crestere: Knowhow for Business library. Starting your own business is a very brave decision and we at Crestere hope that we can help you to make that decision a good one.